Modern consumer electronics, such as game consoles, notebook computers, smart phones, personal digital assistants, and location based services devices, as well as enterprise class electronics, such as servers, storage arrays, and routers, are packing more integrated circuits into an ever-shrinking physical space with expectations for decreasing cost and increasing performance. Contemporary electronics expose integrated circuits to more demanding environmental conditions, such as cold, heat, and humidity requiring the overall system to provide robust thermal management solutions. Higher performance, more functions, lower power usage, and longer usage of battery power are yet other expectations placed upon contemporary electronics.
As more functions are packed into integrated circuits and more integrated circuits into a package, more heat is generated degrading the performance, the reliability, and the lifetime of the integrated circuits as well as the overall system. Numerous technologies have been developed to meet these new requirements. Some of the research and development strategies focus on the integrated circuit technologies and associated integrated circuit packaging. Others focus on other forms of thermal management solutions, such as heat sinks/slug, heat spreaders, or localized fans directly over the integrated circuit. Yet other solutions may use a combination of solutions.
As a more specific example, recent industrial nanoscale research and development has shown promise for reducing the size of memory and logic circuits in information technology applications. In particular, the multi-core CPU era has arrived. As transistor density increases, the number of transistors comprising a single computer core will not change significantly, but the number of cores packaged on the die will now grow exponentially.
Unfortunately, computer performance is already lagging expectations based on Moore's Law due to limitations of the interconnects used to communicate between these cores. However, the communication bandwidth of current and future multi-core systems scale only linearly due to the thermal physics of metal wires used in convention integrated circuits, such as processors (CPU).
As a result, computer architecture is now in crisis, because parallel programming models are severely limited by poor memory and interconnect performance. Computer performance no longer doubles every eighteen months, and there is no reason to believe that this exponential scaling will ever occur again unless dramatic changes to multi-core architectures are enabled by new interconnect technologies.
The critical problems facing general purpose computer design, for example, are heat generation and communication bandwidth. Architectural compromises made to cope with both of these problems make programming difficult and impair application performance.
Thus, a need still remains for an integrated circuit providing high speed interconnects and low power. In view of the ever-increasing need to save costs and improve efficiencies, it is more and more critical that answers be found to these problems.